Have a read of my prose poem, ‘When the New Boyfriend Nearly Died’ first published in Quadrant Magazine. The poem is included in my second poetry collection titled ‘Flat White, One Sugar‘, released this month by Ginninderra Press.
Hope you enjoy it.
When the New Boyfriend Nearly Died:
In the hospital’s public toilet, your face pleads back at you, white and worried. Far as you know, your new boyfriend had a heart attack while bouncing between your child-bearing hips. Too much of a strain. It’s not your fault. When he was admitted to Emergency you didn’t know if you’d ever see him again.
After five hours of waiting, you ask the receptionist if you can go in. When she asks you, you can’t pronounce his Polish surname. You spell out the letters. She considers you through the gap in the partition. You tell her you’re his new girlfriend. So you’re the one, she must be thinking before pressing the red button that lets you in.
He is lying in bed, a canula in his arm. His eyes are closed. You sit in a chair beside him and hold his hand. This would never have happened if it weren’t for you. Nurses and doctors hurry past clutching clipboards.
Don’t die on me, you plead.
If he dies, what you will miss are his text messages of love, the thwack of his body, and the pots of Japanese tea you shared. In bed you’d sip from tiny ceramic mugs.
You make a mental list of your strengths and weaknesses: you’re good at hedonistic pleasures, bad at Cryptics, bad at lonely Sundays, good at making new friends, bad at staying in touch, good at making loose-leaf tea after sex with an addict, good at falling for men who can’t stop swallowing uppers and downers. Good at loving your new boyfriend who took too many pills and now you’re worried he’ll die. Are you dreaming, or did he just squeeze your hand?
Do you plot your stories, or fly by the seat of your pants?
Plot means the story line. When people talk about plotting, they mostly mean how to set up the situation, where to put the turning points, and what the characters will be doing in the end. What happens.
Some fiction writers write organically, not knowing where the story they are writing is going. These writers say it would be boring to know what’s going to happen next and they lose their enthusiasm to tell the story because they know the outcome already. They prefer throwing themselves over the edge and into the void. This method can be very anxiety-producing. It means you need a lot of faith in your process.
Other writers plan the story before they begin. In detective fiction the story definitely needs to be worked out beforehand so information can be drip-fed to the reader.
In the past, when creating my short stories, I have worked organically and not known where my stories were headed as I wrote them. The shorter the piece of fiction, the less need for plot. You can write an interesting story in which not very much happens. A woman fights with her neighbour, a man quits his job, or an unhappy family goes out for a pizza. Simple structures work better than something too complicated when the story is short.
Now that I’m working on a new novel, I feel the need to plot.
“A plot can, like a journey, begin with a single step. A woman making up her mind to recover her father’s oil paintings may be enough to start. The journey begins there, as it did for Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment when he decided to commit his crime,” Jerome Stern Making Shapely Fiction
The plot grows and develops out of what helps and what hinders the characters’ progress toward their goals.
But how do you know if your draft plot has the right amount of weight to carry an entire novel?
What kind of structures work?
Is there a quick way to design your own plot template?
And how do you handle a book with multiple points of view?
“A good plot has a clear motivation. It has a clear structure. It has an outcome. It has subplots. A good plot looks something like the plot structure template below,” The Writers’ Workshop.
Motivation
Lizzie Bennett wants to marry for love
Plot structure
She meets Darcy & Wickham. She dislikes Darcy, and starts to fall for Wickham. Wickham turns out to be a bad guy; Darcy turns out to be a good guy. She now loves Darcy.
Outcome
She marries Darcy
Subplot 1
Jane Bennett (Lizzie’s nice sister) loves Bingley. Bingley vanishes. He reappears. They get hitched.
Subplot 2
Lydia Bennett (Lizzie’s idiot sister) elopes with Wickham. She’s recovered.
Subplot 3
An idiot, Mr Collins, proposes marriage to Lizzie. She says no. Her friend, Charlotte, says yes.
Of course, there are a lot of things that the above plot template doesn’t tell you. It doesn’t say where the novel is set, it doesn’t tell you anything about plot mechanics – it doesn’t say why Lizzie dislikes Mr Darcy, or how Lydia is recovered from her elopement. It doesn’t have anything to say about character.
The Writers’ Workshop strongly advises us to build a template much like the one above before starting to write. “If you’ve already started your MS then, for heaven’s sake, get to that template right away.”
So I’ve decided to put myself out of my misery and create a Plot Template for my new novel. I already had my characters in place and knew what each character wanted. But now I’m forced into planning an ending, which isn’t a bad thing. Some writers don’t find the real beginning to their stories until they’ve written the ending.
So that’s all we need: a beginning, a middle and an end. Aristotle defined it like this: a beginning is what requires nothing to precede it, an end is what requires nothing to follow it, and a middle needs something both before and after it.
Easy peasy. Not.
What about you? Do you plot or write organically? What works and what sends you straight to the Writers Block Corner?
Header image: Photo by Yogendra Singh on Pexels.com
‘Flat White, One Sugar’: 51 new poems by me, 21 illustrations by my granddaughter, Natasha Sommer, a graduate of the National Art School. Cover drawing by Natasha – out soon.
Have a read of my poem ‘White Ibis’, first published in Quadrant Magazine. ‘White Ibis’ is one of the poems in my debut poetry collection ‘The Cellist, A Bellydancer & Other Distractions‘ (Ginninderra Press).
Click ‘Australian Poetry Book Publishers’ to read the 2024 list from Poetry Sydney.
‘Useful if you have a ms eagerly awaiting an outlet, but it’s also a guide for the reader. Explore what’s out there in this country as the press listings also have web page addresses. It’s not all bad news!’ Poet, Les Wicks.
Poetry Sydney is an independent literary organisation committed to a presence for poetry in our culture.
Have a read of my poem ‘Survival’ first published in Quadrant Magazine. ‘Survival’ is one of the poems in my debut poetry collection ‘The Cellist, a Bellydancer & Other Distractions‘ (Ginninderra Press).
My second novel, ‘The Crystal Ballroom‘ (Ginninderra Press) is a novel-in-stories.
So what is a novel-in-stories? One famous example is Elizabeth Strout’s Pullitzer Prize-winning ‘Olive Kitteridge’.
‘A penetrating, vibrant exploration of the human soul, the story of Olive Kitteridge will make you laugh, nod in recognition, wince in pain, and shed a tear or two.’ – Goodreads ‘In a voice more powerful and compassionate than ever before, New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Strout binds together thirteen rich, luminous narratives into a book with the heft of a novel, through the presence of one larger-than-life, unforgettable character: Olive Kitteridge.’
A novel-in-stories, or connected short stories that together become more than the sum of their parts, is also known as a short story cycle.
‘A short story cycle (sometimes referred to as a story sequence or compositenovel) is a collection of short stories in which the narratives are specifically composed and arranged with the goal of creating an enhanced or different experience when reading the group as a whole as opposed to its individual parts.’ – Wikipedia
‘A novel-in-stories is a book-length collection of short stories that are interconnected. (One of the very first examples of this genre is The Canterbury Tales; a more recent example is The Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing, by Melissa Bank.) A novel-in-stories overcomes two key challenges for writers: the challenge of writing a novel-length work, and the challenge of publishing a book-length work of unrelated short stories. (Few publishers are willing to publish a short-story collection from an unknown writer.) So, the novel-in-stories helps you sell a story collection like you would a novel—as long as the interconnected nature of the stories is strong and acts as a compelling hook. Another advantage to novels-in-stories is that they afford you the opportunity to publish pieces of your novel in a variety of literary magazines, which might attract the attention of an editor or agent.’ – Writer’s Digest
My book, ‘The Crystal Ballroom‘ is connected by place and by a first person narrator and her friend who exchange stories about the characters they meet at the singles dances as they search for a regular dance partner.
‘The Crystal Ballroom‘ was launched into the world by Stephen Matthews OAM at Collected Works Bookshop, Melbourne at an afternoon of launches and book readings to celebrate Ginninderra Press’s 21 years of independent publishing.
Have a read of my poem ‘Jogger At My Heels’ first published in The Canberra Times. It is one of the poems in my second poetry collection, ‘Flat White, One Sugar’ due for release by Ginninderra Press this year. 51 new poems by me, 21 illustrations by my granddaughter, Natasha Sommer, a graduate of The National Art School.
Sometimes we sit at our desks to write and can’t think of anything to write about. We face the blank page. We sit there until blood pours from our foreheads, as one famous author was heard to say.
Making a list can be good. It makes you start noticing material for writing in your daily life, and your writing comes out of a relationship with your life in all its richness.
10 ideas for writing practice:
Begin with “I don’t remember”. If you get stumped, just repeat the words “I don’t remember” on the page again and keep going.
Tell about sound as it arises. Be aware of sounds from all directions as they arise: sounds near, sounds far, sounds in front, behind, to the side, above or below. Notice any spaces between sounds.
Tell me about last evening. Dinner, sitting on the couch, preparing for bed. Be as detailed as you can. Take your time to locate the specifics and relive your evening on the page.
Tell me what boredom feels like.
See in your mind a place you’ve always loved. Visualise the colours, the sounds, the smells, the tastes.
Write about “saying goodbye”. Tackle it any way you like. Write about your marriage breakup, leaving home, the death of a loved one.
What was your first job?
Write about the most scared you’ve ever been.
Write in cafes. Write what is going on around you.
Describe a parent or a child.
Some people have a jar full of words written on pieces of paper and select one piece of paper at random each day and write from that. Others use a line of a poem to start them off. Then every time they get stuck they rewrite that line and keep going.
Be honest. Cut through the crap and get to the real heart of things.
Zen Buddhist, psychotherapist, writer and teacher, Gail Sher in her book One Continuous Mistake says the solution for her came via haiku (short unrhymed Japanese poems capturing the essence of a moment).
“For several years I wrote one haiku a day and then spent hours polishing those I had written on previous days. This tiny step proved increasingly satisfying,” Gail Sher.
She said it gradually dawned on her that it was not the haiku but the “one per day.” Without even knowing it, she had developed a “practice.” Every day, no matter what, she wrote one haiku. In her mind she became the person who writes “a haiku a day.” And that was the beginning of knowing who she was.
Gail Sher suggests writing on the same subject every day for two weeks.
“Revisiting the same subject day after day will force you to exhaust stale, inauthentic, spurious thought patterns and dare you to enter places of subtler, more ‘fringe’ knowing,” Gail Sher.
She writes in One Continuous Mistake that the Four Noble Truths for writers are:
Writers write.
Writing is a process.
You don’t know what your writing will be until the end of the process.
If writing is your practice, the only way to fail is to not write.
So start coming up with your own list of ideas for practice writing. Life happening around us is good grist-for-the-mill.
Have a read of my poem ‘Here’, first published in Blue Fringe Art & Literature Exhibition 2021 Collected Works. The poem is also part of my debut poetry collection ‘The Cellist, a Bellydancer & Other Distractions‘ (Ginninderra Press).
Libby Sommer, Author 